Race Driver: Grid – Under the Hood (AU Interview)

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Up to 40,000 fully modelled, animated spectators? Codies talk tech.

By Cam Shea

Race Driver: Grid is shaping up to offer quite a compelling experience for both hardcore racing fans and the more arcade inclined, and an integral part of this is the cutting edge tech and visual panache the team are bringing to the title. The game very much picks up where DiRT left off, and we were curious to find out how that tech and aesthetic has been modified and altered for Grid. Ralph Fulton, Chief Games Designer for Race Driver: Grid, was kind enough to answer our questions.

IGN AU: Grid is a stunning looking game. Tell us a little about Ego - what modifications did you make to Neon to create it?

Ralph Fulton: The EGO Engine is basically an evolution of the NEON Engine that powered Colin McRae DiRT. The Engine itself is a continuously evolving and growing multi-platform project that has already had over 3 years of development from our Central Technology unit. For GRID, the main changes have been to allow for features which DiRT didn't have - 20 car grids, night racing, a 24 hour day-to-night cycle for Le Mans - and there have been numerous changes to our lighting and shader systems which mean that GRID is visually stunning. We've also completely rewritten our car damage and deformation system, and implemented a crowd system which allows us to populate each track with up to 40,000 fully modelled, animated spectators. So, there are a lot of improvements!

An absurd level of detail, really. Other devs can consider the gauntlet well and truly thrown down.

IGN AU: What are the biggest strengths of Ego?

Ralph Fulton: Biggest strengths? Well, on a purely practical level it's a multi-format engine designed to make development on all three platforms - PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC - as simple as possible. We don't have a lead platform so differences between the platforms are pretty negligible and it has the obvious benefit for us that we can focus on really nailing the good stuff rather than splitting our talent and resources between platforms. So that's a massive benefit.

Then there are the obvious gameplay and visual improvements – the damage, the huge amounts of spectators, the physics, the visuals, all this cool stuff we push as far as we can, and it's all powered by the EGO Engine. So it helps us build brilliant games.

And finally, there are big advantages to having a multi-genre engine. You know EGO as a great engine for racing games, but it's also being used for Operation Flashpoint 2 and other internal action projects, which means that a huge number of coders are working on it and improving it constantly.

IGN AU: In terms of art direction, what kind of visual style are you going for with Grid? While very realistic, it also seems larger than life to us.

Ralph Fulton: Yes, there is definitely a deliberate visual style which carries across the whole game. As far as realism goes, when we're producing licensed content – like tracks and cars – it's vital that we are as realistic as possible; the licensors demand that. And when we create street circuits around real-world cities, we want to recreate those cities as accurately as possible, so there's great attention to detail there too. However, we wanted to achieve a much more cinematic quality in GRID's visuals – it's motorsport through the lens of a Hollywood director and that means using lighting and colour and particle effects to create a really immersive and exciting world.

IGN AU: Following on from that, the game has some quite spectacular settings. Taking Shibuya as an example, how faithful a depiction of the area is it? What changes did you make for the sake of gameplay? Do you think racing games can get caught up trying to be too realistic?

Ralph Fulton: As with a lot of our city locations, Shibuya is probably 90% realistic, 10% fictional. We send a team of researchers and photographers out to really nail down the architecture, road layouts and also to capture the feel of the place too. And let me tell you, trying to get shots of central Tokyo without pedestrians is a nightmare – the Shibuya crossing is probably the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world and we had to send our photographers out at the crack of dawn just to get photography of the pavement.

So the buildings and road layouts are very realistic, but we make allowances for gameplay: moving the odd corner, making pedestrian areas race-worthy, shifting any lampposts that infringe on a racing line if people are crashing into them. So there are small sacrifices but they are worth it for gameplay, which is the priority.

I agree that racing games, possibly more than any other genre, can treat realism as an end in itself, but for us the gameplay has to be the most important thing. If your goal is photo-realism (which, when you think about it, is not hugely ambitious given the capabilities of current consoles) then you can end up with quite a dry, lifeless experience. That's a failing of modern racing games in our eyes, and we wanted to make sure that GRID broke that mould. You can judge for yourself whether we've achieved that.

IGN AU: The sensation of speed in the game is excellent – what frame rate will the final game run at, and what techniques are you using to enhance the sensation of speed?

Ralph Fulton: We're going to be locked to 30fps. That was a pretty easy decision to make right at the start of the project – we felt that the visual compromises we would have had to make to achieve 60fps were unacceptable, and I think the way the game looks now definitely bears that decision out.